How can PPC help SEO?

One of the most challenging aspects of SEO is keyword research, a task that needs to be done on an ongoing and regular basis. Keywords which are working to drive conversions in one season, may not in another.

See below a snapshot from Google Trends (Australia). It shows the average searches made in Google for the keyword ‘heaters':

As you can observe here, in January 2011, the search volume is relatively low as expected. Coming into winter in May and June, the temperature drops and the search volume for this keyword begins to rise. With an SEO campaign, setting priorities as to which section of a website or business to focus on is crucial. This is where PPC can play a vital role.

A PPC campaign can be a fantastic way to research which search terms perform better for your business, and at what times of the year. By running a PPC campaign concurrently with an SEO campaign, you are not only gathering important data for keyword research, but you are also increasing the number of visitors and sales to the website.

When you’ve identified keywords that were successful in driving traffic and sales to your website via PPC, doesn’t it make business sense to target them organically as well? Once you rank highly for those keywords and they appear in both the organic and paid results, they’re essentially going to show up twice as much and greatly improve your chances of a user clicking through to your website.

Some other benefits of using PPC to help SEO are:

Branding – The more times your website appears, the more likely people are to recognise it and establish trust with your brand.

GEO location control – This allows you to target ads to certain locations.

Quickly gathered data – Since SEO takes time to kick in, PPC is immediate and the data available helps online marketers to develop long term strategies.

In our experience, we can confidently say that running an SEO and PPC campaign hand-in-hand leads to superior ROI. The additional information we can gather through PPC can easily guide us toward the best path to achieve your online business goals.

If you’re not running a PPC campaign already, we encourage you to contact us today to discuss your options.